Air Canada Aeroplan Top Tier Qualification to require flights on Air Canada

A new development in the ongoing quest of achieving top tier status with Aeroplan for 2011 will be the requirement of actually flying on Air Canada. Up to now, one could fly any Star Alliance airline and post all the status miles to Air Canada to achieve top tier status with Air Canada/Aeroplan. This meant that they may have never set foot on an Air Canada plane yet Air Canada/Aeroplan had to provide that frequent flyer with status. In particular, the Elite Status level is what many non-Air Canada flyers looked for when posting miles to Aeroplan as you only required 35,000 status miles to get the Elite Status and in turn that status gave them Star Alliance Gold status while an airline like United required 50,000 status miles to get the same Star Alliance Gold status.

Fast forward to 2011 and the new rules state that you must fly either 10,000 status miles or 5 eligible status flight segments as part of the qualifying process to achieve Air Canada 2012 Top Tier status (Prestige, Elite and Super Elite). At this point, the complete qualifying criteria has not been released by Air Canada but we can assume it will be the same as the past couple of years where total status miles and/or segments required was 25,000 miles or 25 segments for Prestige, 35,000 miles or 50 segments for Elite and 100,000 miles or 95 segments for Super Elite.

For more details and discussion from many Air Canada frequent flyers please see this post on Flyertalk.